Audience Reviews

AUDIENCE REVIEW: A Sound That I Need by Yiran Shu at UAAD Art Festival 2024

Company:
Yiran Shu & Mingjun Li (Summer Breeze Dance Company)

Performance Date:
October 19, 2024

Freeform Review:

A Sound That I Need is a compelling and assured duet led by Yiran Shu, performed with Mingjun Li at the 2024 UAAD Art Festival at G Gallery in Lower Manhattan. Ms. Shu approaches choreography with the confidence of an artist who understands movement as both a physical language and a cultural vocabulary. The work carries a strong sense of resilience, self-determination, and artistic freedom, unfolding through a carefully shaped progression from restraint to release.

The piece opens with the two dancers standing back to back, alternately concealing and revealing themselves. Their bodies seem suspended within an invisible system of control, evoking the theatrical precision of puppets animated by unseen forces. As the lo-fi rhythm gradually expands, Ms. Shu allows the choreography to open with it. Small, contained gestures evolve into wider pathways, sweeping directional changes, and increasingly expansive use of space. The transformation feels deliberate and emotionally charged, turning physical liberation into the central dramatic force of the work.

One of the most striking moments arrives with the chorus, when Ms. Shu transforms a hand-slapping game familiar to many Chinese children into a sophisticated choreographic exchange. The gesture carries memory, rhythm, intimacy, and playfulness at once. In Ms. Shu’s hands, a simple childhood action becomes a vivid piece of movement language, connecting personal memory with contemporary performance. Throughout the work, influences from Chinese Dai folk dance, West African dance, Hip Hop, and House move fluidly through the choreography, revealing the breadth of Ms. Shu’s movement knowledge and her ability to bring multiple traditions into a singular artistic voice.

Ms. Shu’s greatest strength lies in the clarity of her choreographic authorship. Every shift in rhythm, spatial relationship, and physical dynamic feels purposeful. Her movement vocabulary is expansive, culturally layered, and unmistakably personal. Together, Ms. Shu and Li create an absorbing physical dialogue in which space becomes emotional territory and movement becomes a form of negotiation, trust, resistance, and transformation. Their connection gives the duet a striking immediacy, while Ms. Shu’s performance anchors the work with remarkable presence, control, and sensitivity.

A Sound That I Need distinguished itself through the strength of its artistic vision. Ms. Shu moves confidently across cultural traditions and contemporary movement forms, shaping them into choreography that feels sophisticated, emotionally direct, and deeply alive. Her performance possesses both technical authority and expressive generosity, while her choreography demonstrates a mature understanding of structure, rhythm, and theatrical progression. The work reveals Ms. Shu as an artist with a distinctive international perspective and a powerful ability to transform personal and cultural experience into compelling contemporary performance.